


Autumn Forest Walk

by TrianglePines (orphan_account)



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, M/M, Mild Peril, mild violence, some spooky stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 00:15:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5070433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/TrianglePines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Day 1 of Billdip Week, Oct. 24 2015!  Bill and Dipper go out on a walk and absolutely nothing bad happens whatsoever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Autumn Forest Walk

Bill had said that the leaves looked delicious, and Bill making those sorts of statements usually implied he was up to something stupid, and so Dipper reluctantly agreed to go out on a walk with him in the woods. Unfortunately for Dipper, the weather was already chilly and bound to get even chillier given that dusk was fast-approaching.

"So, are you going to explain what you meant about the leaves being delicious? I really hope you didn't actually mean that literally," said Dipper.

"Yes, I did! Well, no, not exactly. What I meant is, they are at their PRIME crispiness, Pine Tree," Bill explained, waving a hand.

Dipper crossed his arms firmly. "I am not eating leaves, and I don't care how delicious you say they are."

"What? Jeez, you're dumb, I didn't mean we were literally going to eat them. It's a metaphor, Pine Tree, ever heard of one?"

Dipper grimly remembered something about putting cigarettes between your teeth and not smoking them being a really stupid metaphor in one of those movies Mabel loved.

"No, no, look at this. Are you ready? This is about to blow your mind."

"Please, go ahead, commence blowing my mind."

Bill took a dramatic pause, then hopped up and landed on the ground with the _CRUNCH_ of the leaves underneath him. And then he jumped up and down a few more times. _Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!_

"...Bill, it's 8 PM and below freezing."

"Yes, and that's why we can't afford to wait. These leaves are gonna frost over tonight, and then tomorrow morning the frost is going to melt and the leaves will be all soggy and gross and not crunchy at all. Do you want to jump in soggy leaves, Pine Tree? I most certainly don't want to jump in soggy leaves."

Dipper briefly took a moment to wonder how he had ever gotten to this point in his life.

"Okay, whatever, I guess we can stand here and jump in leaves until dark if you want," Dipper conceded.

"What? We aren't standing here, whenever you jump in leaves they lose their crunchiness! You can't pop the bubble wrap that's already been popped, we have to keep going."

Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! Bill hopped down a path of carnage, violently disemboweling perfectly neat leaf piles and letting them spill out all over the place. Grunkle Stan was gonna be so upset when he saw what happened to all the yardwork he made Dipper do.

"Can you at least put on a coat? You're going to freeze to death. I'm freezing to death, and I actually have one."

Bill turned around. His face did have an awfully blueish tinge to it. "Hah, I'll be fine. I like the cold. It makes you all numb and stuff."

"That means you're getting hypothermia, which leads to frostbite, which leads to necrosis, which leads to your hands falling off, which leads to you never slamming your own arm into a drawer for fun ever again. Coat. Now."

Bill _hmmph_ 'ed and Dipper dragged him back inside and forced him to bundle up because he had absolutely no self-preservation instinct of his own. Bill did not like coats. They made him feel like he was being suffocated inside of a blanket. They were big and bulky and if you wore the wind resistent kind they made this weird scrapey noise that really bugged him whenever you moved your arms. That wasn't even starting on mittens, those awful torture devices of human dexterity limitation. People had five fingers for a reason, they were not meant to slap around stumpy arms like penguin flippers, and he had no idea why they chose to punish themselves in this way.

He chose to put up with it, though, because mittens thankfully did not hinder his ability to make the leaves go crunch!

With most of the leaves gone, Dipper could actually observe some things he couldn't normally. He studied the bark on the trees. _Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!_ The pattern the ridges made was interesting, in a way. If you looked at it long enough, the random ridges started to shape objects - little sheds and street lamps. _Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!_ There were also some claw marks in them, where squirrels and other critters must have skittered up into their nests high in the trees.  
Bill had already tripped over a multitude of roots hidden underneath leaf piles and faceplanted into more leaf piles, but he was clearly enjoying himself here. The sun had nearly set and it was cold out, and Dipper finally decided to join him.

 _Crunch!_ Crunch! _Crunch!_ Crunch! _Crunch!_ Crunch! _Crunch!_ Crunch! _Cr-_

There went Bill again, toppling himself into a tree and knocking his forehead against it before finally tipping over. "I'm good!" he called weakly from his position facedown on the ground. It became difficult to breathe with all the leaf dust, so he was forced to push himself up on his arms. The first thing his eyes met was the surface of the tree he'd just collided with.

Claw marks. Deep claw marks. Three pronounced grooves coming in to converge at the same point, dust torn up from the bark encrusted around them.

Bill's eyes widened.

Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!

"Hey, Pine Tree!" Bill sat up and gave his dizzy head time to straighten before it refocused on Dipper, who was jumping in leaves just as Bill had been a minute ago.

"We...should go."

"What? I'm finally enjoying myself after you were the one who wanted to come out here, and now you want to go in? Is your goal to just always irritate me or what?"

**Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.**

Neither of them were jumping, but plodding footsteps were rustling leaves and shaking the ground beneath them.

"We really need to get out of here, right now."

It was cold.

"Bill, would you mind explaining what you're talking about?"

The sun had set.

"I don't think we have time, can we please just go?"

It was cold.

"Okay, okay, sure, whatever you say, you seem pretty urgent about this, so.."

The wind was howling.

"Uh...we came from that way, right?"

It was cold.

"Bill? What the FUCK is that?"

Bill turned his head just enough to see a black mass standing over him before he bolted.

"Run! Run run run run run, don't look back, just run!"

Bill did look back, several times, to make sure Dipper was right there still, and to make sure the hulking shadow hurdling towards them, gaining momentum, wasn't yet upon them. Stupid coat! It was making it even harder to move in a knotty forest covered in roots and rocks and leaf piles and prickly bushes and every natural hazard imaginable to make it harder to run away.

"WE ARE GOING TO DIE-"

"NO, NO, WE JUST NEED TO GET BACK TO THE SHACK, IT WON'T LEAVE THE WOODS, I - WE'RE GONNA DIE"

Their hearts were pounding - Bill had never felt this kind of, what was the word, adrenaline? He was never afraid to die before, being essentially immortal, but oh GOD did he not want to be on the business end of those claws- there was a difference between liking pain and wanting to experience whatever circle of hell that was! They were sprinting to the point where they spent more time in the air than their feet did connected to the ground and it was still gaining on them, their only saving grace being that it was too big to navigate through the same spaces as them.

"There's a clearing up ahead, we went the right way!"

"You're welcome for my sense of direction!"

They cleared the last log blocking the clearing the Mystery Shack was in off from the rest of the woods and skidded to a frantic stop to see it smash into the edge of the woods like an invisible barrier. They could see it clearly for the first time, a monstrous stag-like creature bulky in some places and withered in others. Its disfigurement would have been sad if not for it just attempting to murder them.

Bill threw his arms up triumphantly. "HA! SUCK IT!"

Its arm rose up and Bill could see its hand - sharp-clawed, three-fingered, with two stumpy blank spaces, like if someone had gotten hypothermia, and then frostbite, and then necrosis, and then their fingers had fallen off.

The barrier kept the creature in the woods, but not all of it. It swept its arm down.

The first thing Bill was conscious of when he woke up was that his face stung.

"Oh, good, you're awake. Have you ever heard of the rule where you don't go back to taunt the monster?" Dipper asked, cracking a dry smile.

"No, I haven't, but I have now. Am I alive?"

"Yeah, you're fine. I yanked you out of the way in time. It scratched your face but Grunkle Stan says the worst it'll do is scar. Are you going to explain what that thing was now?"

"Jeez, I just woke up from a near-death experience and this is my welcome back party? Nice hospitality, Pine Tree."

"Hey, the near-death experience was your fault, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I hope jumping in leaves was worth it to you."

Bill thought about that a moment. "Yes, entirely worth it. Anyhow, that was a wendigo. They like the cold and human flesh."

"How quaint. I've got some pretty fresh mental images there, how much do you know about them?" Dipper asked.

"Just about everything."

"Okay, great, fetch me a blank journal, we have some documenting to do."

**Author's Note:**

> sorry it ends a little abruptly! i couldn't find the ability to draw for today's challenge so i wrote this little ficlet instead. i hope you guys liked it!


End file.
